Virginia Woolf Quotes - Page 4

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

Death is woven in with the violets,” said Louis. “Death and again death.”)

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]

I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.

anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

Every face, every shop, bedroom window, public-house, and dark square is a picture feverishly turned-in search of what? It is the same with books. What do we seek through millions of pages?

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.